“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustave Flaubert

A Thousand Millennia Hence…

Here’s an odd thing! On the night of 10/11-Oct-08, I had a dream in which I was four billion years in the future… humankind has done away with time and space, and every individual exists in their own unique thought-universe… my thought-universe is a simulacrum of Earth/2008… each individual can exist simultaneously within any number of individuals’ thought-universes, as well as their own…

I saw what had the appearance of a gravestone or monument, upon which was the inscription “1 million AD Iron Age” – which brought to mind the knowledge that humanity, at 1 million AD, had culturally/technologically reverted to the Iron Age…

I saw two version of the same CD in a shop – I wanted one version, someone else wanted the other…

* * * * *

God knows what the CD thing is all about! However…

I have recently started reading Greg Egan’s latest novel, “Incandescence”… I only started reading this novel after the dream, which, as it happens, is set one million years hence… about half-way through the novel, two of the protagonists discover the existence of an intergalactic race who they call “The Steelmakers” – on account of the fact that the main piece of evidence for their existence is a pool of melted steel on an otherwise desolate planet… steel/iron… can you see where I’m going with this?

And… as it turns out… the citizens of one million years hence, the humans and other races who form the intergalactic meta-civilisation known as The Amalgam, create, when they communicate with each other, unique-to-each-individual thought-universes, which are inhabited simultaneously by each individual.